Success Story: NHS Health Scotland

To respond to ongoing growth and organisational change, NHS Health Scotland appointed us to work on an IT-led change programme, the Business Improvement Programme.

Having grown from 60 employees to 300 in five years, the NHS wanted an IT infrastructure that would grow with the organisation, enabling better internal communication and collaboration among staff.

We were engaged to design and deliver the solution, in partnership with Maindec and Brightsolid. To underpin the new solution, we put in place a Microsoft-based technology improvement stack. This included Lync corporate messaging to enable instant communication across the organisation, as well as Windows Server, SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. In designing the solution, we engaged with more than half of NHS Health Scotland’s staff in order to validate their major business requirements.

The intranet, known as The Source, was created using our Kira intranet accelerator, ensuring rapid delivery of a very stable, bespoke platform. Subsequently we delivered two new public-facing websites to support mental health awareness, and workplace-based health information, built on our PortalPlus accelerator. Both expanded the organisation’s reach, and were among the UK’s first SharePoint 2013 websites.

Our SharePoint solutions supported NHS Health Scotland staff in moving to remote, flexible and mobile working practices and a move from five physical offices to two. We also implemented an enterprise content management (ECM) solution to replace the organisation’s informal ad-hoc system, which had been based on shared drives and email. This new document and records management system takes full advantage of SharePoint’s collaboration and sharing features.

We are now working on replacing the organisation’s business planning and reporting system with a business intelligence system which will provide more flexible self-service reporting using Power BI.